Book review: ‘We Need New Names,’ by NoViolet Bulawayo

We Need New Names, NoViolet Bulawayo’s bold debut, plunges into the lives of kids growing up in recent post-British independence Zimbabwe, a time of hunger, unrest and upheaval — yet also cultural pride.

Although schools are shuttered, the kids display savvy awareness of world events, evident in the games they play, such as “Find Bin Laden” and “country-game,” in which each participant assumes a role as a country and “everybody wants to be the U.S.A. and Britain and Canada” and “nobody wants to be rags of countries like Congo, like Somalia, like Iraq … and not even this one we live in — who wants to be a terrible place of hunger and things falling apart?”

The hungry children often search for guavas in Budapest, the wealthiest neighborhood near their own ramshackle one, called Paradise.

The kids’ guava hunt puts them at the center of the action when a group of Paradise men, inspired by Robert Mugabe’s program of land reform, seizes the luxurious house of a white couple.

As seen through the eyes of 10-year-old Darling, Zimbabwe’s troubles are legion — from incest that results in her friend Chipo’s pregnancy, to gnawing hunger that prompts the kids to grin for NGO photos to earn snacks. Rampant emigration sends many, including Darling’s father, to seek opportunities abroad.

Darling’s father returns when he’s dying of AIDS, a pervasive specter the kids know as “the Sickness.” Yet these kids are not downtrodden — on the contrary, they are proud, resourceful, witty, boastful and always dreaming of better days.

It’s easy to see why Bulawayo, a Zimbabwe native who earned degrees at Texas A&M-Commerce, Southern Methodist University and Cornell and currently holds a prestigious Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, has won so many accolades even before publishing her first book. In Darling, Bulawayo has created a fresh, believable voice of a young woman that stays true to her age and perspective while conveying eye-opening layers of knowledge, pairing innocence with singular experience.

In the second half of the book, when Darling moves to Michigan, she pines for home even as she tries to lead a typical American teenage life with the access to Facebook and Internet pornography this entails. When she daydreams over a guava smuggled through the mail that transports her to Zimbabwe, we are with her.

For all its charms, We Need New Names is not quite structured as a novel. Bulawayo introduces elements that seem central to the story, such as Chipo’s pregnancy, Darling’s father’s illness and Darling’s expired visitor visa, but doesn’t develop them.

When Darling moves to America, she’s suddenly there, with no building of suspense or detailing of plans that the move is imminent. Characters appear and quickly disappear. Each of these chapters is intense, moving and vivid, but it’s best to enjoy them as stories, and not look for overall plot momentum. This isn’t Bulawayo’s fault, but that of the pesky, sales-seeking subtitle “A Novel” that marks many linked story collections.

With talent this ringing, readers can expect continued fine writing from Bulawayo, in whatever form it takes. We Need New Names shows that even children raised in what Darling calls “the tatters” of a country carry forward memories of languages, cuisine and traditions that forever shape their imaginations.

Jenny Shank’s first novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award.

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